Most of us have probably heard about Job in the Bible. Job was a man who loved God and was very successful in life. One day, the devil was talking to God, and God pointed out Job to Satan, bragging about how faithful Job was. Satan replied that the reason Job loved God so much was that God took good care of him. He suggested that if Job had to live the sort of life most other people had to, it would be a different story. So, the bet was on. God allowed Satan to harass Job as Satan saw fit. As God put it (1:12), “Everything he has is in your hands, but you must not lay a hand on the man himself.”
From there, it was downhill for Job. Each month was worse than the month before, and Job didn’t understand why. His friends tried to help him figure it out, but they only made things worse. For example, they suggested that maybe Job had messed up somehow and that God was mad at him. Job went through a slew of questions that he directed at God: for example, “If I’m a good guy, why am I suffering while the bad guys are living it up?” and “God, are you really being fair to me?” Another question was, “Why don’t you answer me anymore, God, like you used to?” Finally, he asked, “Why was I even born?”
At this point (Chapter 38), God does answer Job, but not in the way Job expected.
How to flunk Algebra (two times)
Now, let’s put Job aside for a few moments. When I was in ninth grade, I flunked Algebra (twice) for two reasons. I flunked it in the spring semester of high school and again in summer school. My classmates understood why I flunked during the school year: the teacher was a real you-know-what! And half a dozen others in my class flunked as well. But summer school? Nobody flunked summer school. It was like Craig (Ice Cube) in the movie *Friday* getting fired from work on his day off. As Smokey said at least half a dozen times in that movie, “Ain’t nobody gets fired on their day off!”
The other reason I flunked Algebra is that I tried to understand how formulas and such worked. The teacher would say, “Give it up. You don’t need to know how it works; it just does.”
The Pain of Healing
God knew that Job would not understand why this was happening if He explained it, so instead, God spends the chapter trying to show Job that he (Job) was a mere mortal. Job could not comprehend the reasoning, just as a three-year-old cannot understand why they need an immunization when they feel fine.
I used to have to help out in the immunization clinic when I was a medic in the Air Force. Sometimes it was tedius work when you have two hundred people lined up and you were using the “gun” to administer the shots. Other times when you used the needle it could be positively heartbreaking. I’ve heard little children scream and plead with their parents as soon as they saw a needle. If the child is sick, at least you can say that the shot will make them get well and they will feel better. But if the child is well, then they don’t understand why a stranger is allowed to hurt them with a needle while their parents do nothing to stop it.
I’ve had to debride
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much.
Who determined its dimensions and stretched out the surveying line?
What supports its foundations, and who laid its cornerstone?”
Today, I read about people, mostly Zoomers and Alphas (generations), and how their lives are totally messed up. They want to know how things got so bad. And when they finish their rant, they often ask the question, “Why was I even born?”
There are reasons they were born, but they don’t know what they are, and I sure don’t. God knows, but sometimes it is too complicated to people figure out. Maybe it would be too painful for that person to hear the truth? Or there’s a reason God can’t tell us at the moment. So, I wanted to spend some time explaining parts of the chapter without going into every single verse.
“Who kept the sea inside its boundaries as it burst from the womb . . .
For I locked it behind barred gates, limiting its shores.”
I’ve had to debride saucer-sized, third-degree burns on a person’s body daily for several weeks. We would give the patient roughly half a grain of morphine twenty minutes in advance of the procedure. Then, using small sterile scissors, a scalpel, and forceps, and occasionally something similar to a grill brick—the kind of hard-textured accessory used in a restaurant—we would remove all of the dead skin at the margins of the wound and whatever unhealthy tissue was forming over the center. Most of the time, the burn cases on my floor were due to accidents. Sometimes, they result from a criminal act, though that was never the case with any patient I treated. If the person was “lucky,” the eventual scar would be hidden from casual view, such as on an arm or a leg. In other cases, the scars were prominent and disfiguring for life. Why did God allow this to happen? The only answer I can offer is, “I just don’t know.” I do know that there are more than a few people who lead reckless lives. They fall from great heights trying to take selfies. In other cases, they involve themselves in drinking while in college, and assuming they don’t die from alcohol poisoning, they are often sexually assaulted after passing out. Some kids vape (even ghost vape), knowing vaguely that it’s harmful, and two years later, they are days away from dying of something called EVALI (e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury). Many of these individuals expect God to deliver them from the consequences of their bad behavior.
What about innocent victims? These are people hit by drunk drivers or students wounded or killed by a shooter while at school. We witness these atrocious acts as they replay on the evening news.
I witnessed something heartbreaking once. There was a family that we knew fairly well. The parents were around our age at the time (mid-thirties), and their two children were around eight or nine. One day, the husband suddenly told his wife he was divorcing her and remarrying another woman he had been secretly seeing. A week or two later, the mother suffered a serious stroke. She could make noises but not form words. One side of her body was paralyzed, so if she ever walked again with a cane, it would not be anytime soon. Additionally, she was at risk of another stroke in the weeks that followed. As I stood watching her, feeling helpless, I became aware of a subjective stream of consciousness winding its way through my mind. I understood that God knew what had happened and that this family friend’s life was forever changed. But I was also reminded that God is a just God. This is not to imply that the friend deserved any of this. I understood it to mean that when the scales of our lives are balanced—whether in terms of the good versus bad things we’ve done, or in terms of loving God versus hating God, reward versus punishment—that this woman’s suffering would be recognized and (for lack of a better word), compensated. Beyond this I cannot explain.
“Have you explored the springs from which the seas come? Have you explored their depths?
Do you know where the gates of death are located? Have you seen the gates of utter gloom?”
God’s ways are not our ways
God is very unpredictable. We see this in the life of Jesus. In the Gospel of John, Chapter 9, Jesus encountered a man who was blind from birth. The common belief back then was that someone had sinned; this is evident in the disciples’ question to Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Notice what Jesus replied: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Jesus stated that the reason this person was blind from birth was that one day the blind man’s path in life and Jesus’ path would cross. His blindness would serve as an opportunity for Jesus to perform a miracle that you and I would be reading about today. And how many thousands of people though the ages found that story to be hopeful, life changing to them?
But notice how Jesus healed him. Jesus didn’t just say, “You can see.” Instead, he spat on the ground, mixed his saliva with the dirt until it turned to mud, and made mud patties to place on the man’s eyes, telling him to go into the city and wash off the mud at a certain pool. Why do it that way? I have no idea. The point, though, is that this person had to go through life without seeing because God had a special plan for him. Was God being fair to this man? Well, that was one of Job’s questions. Job at one point was convinced that life wan’t fair. No doubt, you know half a dozen people yourself who would tell you the exact same thing.
However, after gaining his sight for the first time in his life, the remaining verses in the chapter suggest that he didn’t express any concern about what had happened to him now that he could finally see
“Have you visited the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of hail?”
Intuition & Instinct
In verse 36, God says that He “gives intuition to the heart and instinct to the mind.” We all have, to some degree, intuition. This is sometimes called a “gut feeling.” It is properly defined as “an ability to understand or know something without needing to think about it or use reason to discover it, or a feeling that shows this ability.” Where we differ is in the degree to which we trust our intuition. When we first hear someone suggest something, most of us will know if it seems legal or sketchy, safe or dangerous, a good idea or a bad idea. If you are an intuitive person and you act on your intuition, you are not over-analyzing some proposal or invitation.
If you are waiting for an Uber after dark and it starts to rain, and someone pulls up to the curb and says that they are with Lyft and offers you a ride, your intuition will tell you whether to accept the ride or whether to check the driver out before you climb in. Do they have any identification supporting their claim to be legitimate? Is their car clean? Do they look dangerous? If you accept a ride, it might be your last. On the other hand, if they can show you that they are employed by Lyft, then you might take a chance. Most of us should follow our intuition. When I would give my college classes exams, I would tell them to read each question and the choices carefully, and that the answer that first pops into your mind is probably the correct one. Most people who change an answer change it from the right answer to the wrong answer. God gives us intuition and, to some degree, suspiciousness so people can’t scam us. If we take this too far, then we become paranoid.
Then there is instinct. We are born with instincts as well as intuition to keep us alive. Birds that must migrate as the seasons become either too hot or too cold have instincts that take them north or south as the need approaches. Even insects have instincts. One day, while in the military as I was deployed with a field hospital similar to a MASH unit, I was sitting on a box or something and saw a monarch butterfly flutter past me. It approached me from behind on my left, and after passing me and flying about five feet beyond me, it suddenly doubled back towards me and then looped back to its original course. I watched as it approached a large rock. It flew over the rock, feigned to the right, and then disappeared between two trees on my left (or something like this). About once every forty-five to sixty seconds, another single monarch followed the exact same path, approaching from behind me on my left, doubling back, and then returning to its original course before crossing the rock at the same spot as the earlier monarch. Over the next half hour, I must have counted thirty or more butterflies exhibiting the exact same behavior. A monarch can fly 100 miles a day as it migrates 3,000 miles. This insect, with 30 chromosomes and almost 17,000 genes, has the ability to traverse the North American continent!
“Who is the mother of the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens?
For the water turns to ice as hard as rock, and the surface of the water freezes.”
Humans have instincts as well. Perhaps the chief of them is our instinct to survive. Others involve parenting, altruism, fear, curiosity and reproductive instinct among the remainder.
“Can you direct the movement of the stars— binding the cluster of the Pleiades or loosening the cords of Orion?
Can you direct the constellations through the seasons or guide the Bear with her cubs across the heavens?”
It’s worth bringing up the topic of “Why me?” I spent a year in Vietnam. I wasn’t “in the bush” with an M-16 and a bayonet, but I was at a front-line base that was attacked several times a week by mortars and rockets, and parts of it were always in danger of being overrun. I was a young Christian then, with no animosity toward the Vietnamese people I met. In fact, I made a Vietnamese friend there who eventually lived with my family in South Florida after the country fell. But I came home feeling guilty almost as much as I was glad—glad that I did not come home in a coffin, and relieved that I had both of my legs and arms. But guilt consumed me, as some brothers-in-arms did not make it home. When we came under attack, I would recall Psalm 91:7, where David wrote, “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” The “it” refers to 122mm and 140mm rockets. There were Americans on either side of me who were wounded or killed, though not thousands. The strange thing was that they were not specifically targeted. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army soldiers jury-rigged their rocket launches by propping the launch tubes up in the general direction of the base. Even so, with the fire being imprecise, it was still capable of maiming and killing. I don’t know why I was spared. I’m certainly no St. Francis.
It’s worth bringing up the topic of “Why me?” I spent a year in Vietnam. I wasn’t “in the bush” with an M-16 and a bayonet, but I was at a front-line base that was attacked several times a week by mortars and rockets, and parts of it were always in danger of being overrun. I was a young Christian then, with no animosity toward the Vietnamese people I met. In fact, I made a Vietnamese friend there who eventually lived with my family in South Florida after the country fell. But I came home feeling guilty almost as much as I was glad—glad that I did not come home in a coffin, and relieved that I had both of my legs and arms. But guilt consumed me, as some brothers-in-arms did not make it home. When we came under attack, I would recall Psalm 91:7, where David wrote, “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” The “it” refers to 122mm and 140mm rockets. There were Americans on either side of me who were wounded or killed, though not thousands. The strange thing was that they were not specifically targeted. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army soldiers jury-rigged their rocket launches by propping the launch tubes up in the general direction of the base. Even so, with the fire being imprecise, it was still capable of maiming and killing. I don’t know why I was spared. I’m certainly no St. Francis.
“Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God.”
Look at the photo of the soldiers and the dog. The dog’s name is Yeager, an improvised explosive device detection dog. Yeager is lying in front of a makeshift memorial for his handler, Lance Cpl. Abraham Tarwoe, who was killed in action in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on April 12, 2012. Cpl. Tarwoe was assigned to be Yeager’s handler the previous July.
Perhaps Cpl. Tarwoe also recited Psalm 91:7, just as I had? Combat dogs and their handlers are teamed for life and are fiercely loyal to each other. Cpl. Tarwoe laid his life on the line to protect his comrades from hidden explosives; yet, this sacrifice cost him his life. Who knows?
An interesting side point
A curious point that has nothing to do specifically with this post, but I’ll mention it anyway, is that there are times in the Old Testament when a storm accompanies the presence of God or some other divine event. In Job 38:1, we’re told that God speaks to Job from within a whirlwind (הַסְּעָרָ֗ה). In II Kings 2:11, the prophet Elijah is taken to heaven in a fiery chariot, in the presence of a whirlwind (בַּֽסְעָרָ֖ה). In Jeremiah 23:19, there is a reference to a “whirlwind of the Lord.” In I Kings 19:11, there is a powerful wind as God passes by Elijah. The English equivalent of the Hebrew word for whirlwind might bring a tornado to mind, but it can also suggest a hurricane, which also has a vortex.
When I think of Heaven, I don’t think of the sky “up there” or a planet “out there.” I think it is entirely possible that Heaven is much closer to us; in that case, it could be a different dimension. When God dispatches an angel, it need only slip through a portal. I’ve written extensively on portals.
Given our present knowledge, a portal, while possible, is purely hypothetical, but it can explain certain phenomena we are seeing on earth. Were a hypothetical portal to open, there might very well be characteristics of a whirlwind, such as air turbulence, temperature changes, and drops in barometric pressure. A vortex itself might be possible as air and moisture are pulled from one dimension into another. Electromagnetic differences between the two realities could produce lightning and therefore thunder as well.
This is not to say that I believe God is an “extraterrestrial.” Not at all. Nor am I suggesting that God resides in another dimension and requires a portal to enter our reality. What I am saying is that there is nothing in Scripture, to my knowledge, that would prohibit the existence of more than our 3+1 dimensional world; in that case, there would be more than enough room for Heaven, and at least seven other dimensions to accommodate it. In that sense, I don’t see a discussion on this topic to be any different than some of the questions raised by Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225-1274.)
